On Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:01:17 +0000, Neil Williams wrote:


Set of lifts in a Cairo 5* hotel. Calling the lift is done by pressing a
centrally-located button in the lobby that requests a particular floor.
You are then directed to the relevant lift when it arrives. Once inside
the lift you can't "redirect" it to any additional floors.

I've seen one like that myself - I think it was in the office building
next to the NH hotel in Den Haag.

There were a number of buildings in Sydney (Australia) equipped with
such lifts designed by Leo Port, and engineer (and politician, he became
mayor of Sydney).

They were never particularly popular. There are probably non left now.

I worked in a building that had a set, people were always complaining
about them as they would 'run for a lift' and then find they couldn't
select the floor once on board.

In my time there, the lifts were replaced with a modern system.

The Leo Port lift was exceedingly complex and with the control logic
implemented in two large racks of what looked like telephone cross-bar
relays. By the time I worked in the building, the system was suffering
reliability issues due to age. But interestingly, not in the complex Leo
Port relay logic, but the motor contactors were falling apart with old
age, leading to many instances of 'people trapped in the lift' when a
motor contactor fell apart.

However if you step back from the 'non standard user interface' and
think about it, making the riders pre-select their floors means the lift
controller can make better decisions on how to deploy the cars.

It was not uncommon to see, in response to a number of floor calls, to
see two lifts arrive, one would be 'express' to the higher selected
floors and the other would take the lower.